Nanette-Jeanne Vivant Passebon (prettycentarian) wrote in v_nocturne_rpg, @ 2009-08-26 09:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | nanette-jeanne vivant passebon |
My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean
"My Bonnie lies over the ocean," Nanette's sweet, high voice lilted into the stillness of the attic. "My Bonnie lies over the sea..." She hummed the next lines to herself, focusing on the needle and thread in hand as she worked.
Nanette had always been somewhat proud of her needlework. Her first sampler, done at the tender age of eleven years so long ago, had been prized at the small school for the children of the upper crust in Havana. When visitors came to her father's plantation and Nanette was made to demonstrate her skills, her embroidery had always brought the most praise, even beyond her skillful playing of the piano and kind, astute manners. In later years, Dr. Passebon had taught her more intricate methods of stitching, which had come to be quite useful.
"Bring back, bring back, bring back my Bonnie to me, to me," she carried on softly, pausing to smile at her guest as she worked. ""Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonnie to me!"
She paused in her singing, reaching to her sewing basket for a shining pair of scissors to snip the last bit of thread left in her needle and tie off her stitchery. Re-threading with a new piece of silk, she stabbed the needle into her makeshift pincushion before turning back to her scissors. Using the scissor blade as a razor, she split open her work and snipped away a few bits of fascia.
"I've always enjoyed that song," she spoke thoughtfully. "My first husband was rather fond of it himself, though I suspect it had more to do with the Scottish whore he'd found himself in Havana. Isn't that strange? In Havana, of all places. Though I suppose prostitutes do make their way around, don't they?"
Another split, and more fascia removed, and she was ready to begin threading. "Speaking of Bonnies... I am terribly disappointed to see your wife has passed on," Nanette went on. With a tittering laugh, she shook her head. "Of course, dear, I know her name wasn't Bonnie... though I daresay my Fernando's whore might have called the dear a 'bonny wee lass'!"
She cast a glance over her shoulder to wear the chained body of a young woman lay upon the floor. The dried mucus and blood that marred her pretty face buzzed with visiting blowflies that flitted in and out of her nostrils and parted lips. Her long blond hair, which Nanette had ordered her man Martin to brush each day, was coiled prettily about her head on the hardwood floor as glazed, deadened green eyes stared wide ahead at nothing.
"I wish you might've let us know she was ill," Nanette said to her guest. "Dr. Passebon might be an invalid but he does pass his medical knowledge to me, you know. Though I can't imagine how you might have alerted us!" She laughed softly and reached to tap a slim finger against the mouth of the man bound to the cot at her side; his lips had been sewn shut some weeks before, and Nanette had ordered him fed with a port cut into his cheek and a tube that pumped in thin gruel to keep him alive.
"She was such a pretty thing," Nanette explained. "Such a beautiful face! I'd have liked to have kept it, for my collection."
The man and his wife, their names lost to Nanette's memory as unimportant trifles, had arrived in London just as Nanette had set up house. She had put in a call for her belongings and some special herbs and minerals to be brought from the villa she had briefly occupied in the mountainous region of Eastern Europe, and had agreed to pay transportation for the items as well as whoever might take the position as caretaker in the journey. Free passage to London was not something easily dismissed, and the man and his wife had immediately jumped at the chance, never knowing as they entered the Passebon home that they would never be leaving.
Paralyzed with a tincture of curare that Nanette had created herself, the man could do nothing but watch as he became fodder for the alchemist and amature anatomist's experiments. She lifted his hand again, snipping away more flesh and fascia from the side of his index and middle fingers before creating to small flaps to begin sewing the fingers together. His left hand had healed well enough, though the flipper-like effect Nanette had been trying to create had been hampered by the method she had used, simply sewing the unmarred flesh together and washing with a mixture of alcohol and Lugol's Iodine to stave off infection. With the right hand, Nanette had chosen a new method; snipping away the bits of fascia and skin so that muscle rest against muscle, hopefully to grow together into a flattened, fingerless appendage with time.
With any luck, it would at the least remain free of infection so that the man's hands could stay complete. It would have been nice to say the same for his legs, but once the gangrene had arrived, Nanette had to remove them from the knee down, lest she lose her subject entirely.
Wrenching her needle from where she had placed it, deep into the soft flesh of his cheek, Nanette began to sew.
"Ah well," she sighed. "There will be others, of course. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so quick to spy a head I meant to keep. I do pride myself on my taste, after all, and I need to be more selective. I do plan to keep Martin, of course, but that is really more out of affection."
She smiled down at the man at her side. "You've not to worry about such things, though," she explained. "I've decided to keep you alive as long as I can, and usually in such cases the face will be so wasted, it will no longer be a decent showpiece."
She patted his head affectionately, then resumed her work and her song.
"Last night as I lay on my pillow, last night as I lay on my bed... last night as I lay on my pillow, I dreamed that my Bonnie was dead..."